The term "Sino-Soviet Split" refers to the
gradual worsening of relations between the Soviet Union and the People's
Republic of China, and between their respective Communist Parties.
While discomfiture between them had long roots, reaching back to civil wars in
China prior to the establishment of the People's Republic, the disagreements
gained momentum in the decades after China's liberation and would eventually
lead to the Soviets referring to the Chinese as "splittists",
"left-wing adventurists", "anti-Marxist" enemies of
Socialism "in league with Imperialism", while the Chinese came to
regard the Soviets as "revisionists" and
"social-imperialists", or "socialist in words, imperialists in
deeds", and as "the principal danger in the world today."
Graduating from words to deeds, the conflict was expanded from an ideological
one between two political parties to a conflict between nation states as
relations between the USSR and the PRC were severed and, in 1969, their troops
clashed across their common border.

Though various authors place emphases differently, its
pretty generally agreed that the main issues separating the Communist Party of
China (CPC) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) revolved around
the questions of evaluation of Stalin, "Peaceful Coexistence",
"Peaceful Transition to Socialism", and War and
Imperialism. Briefly:

1. On Stalin: The CPC objected to the CPSU
de-Stalinization campaign, arguing that the general line of the International
Communist Movement (ICM) had been correct during Stalin's tenure, that he was
not just a Russian or Soviet leader, but a leader of world stature with a
world-wide legacy which could not be swept aside by the CPSU leadership, and
that overall, his successes outweighed his failings.

2. On War: Whereas the CPSU recognized the
power of the imperialist coalition arrayed against the socialist bloc and saw
disastrous consequences for the world as a whole from nuclear war, the CPC
tended to disparage the imperialists, a sentiment echoes in Mao's famous
aphorism that "Imperialists are paper tigers", and instead spoke of
turning world war into revolutionary war.

3. On Peaceful Coexistence: Deriving from its views
on the dangers of nuclear war, the CPSU saw coexistence with the West as in the
mutual interest of both systems. The Chinese saw this as capitulation.

4. Peaceful Transition: The CPSU and its allied
parties advocated using democratic and peaceful means to advance the struggles
of the working class and toward winning state power wherever those means were
available. The CPC, on the other hand, disparaged such methods and proposed that
the need for revolutionary war in order to seize power was a universal law of
class struggle.

The conflict wound down after the death of Mao Zedong and
the end of the Cultural Revolution in China. In the 1980s, relations
between the two countries were normalized, and any remaining conflicts were more
or less rendered moot by the dissolution of the USSR. Nonetheless, thanks
in part to the Chinese flooding the world with pamphlets outlining their views,
and mainly to the importance of the two countries and the issues they brought
up, for a large portion of the latter half of the Twentieth Century whether one
was "Pekingese" or "Muscovite" was pretty much the
question for the world's non-Trotskyist Left.

Points of Departure

In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a report criticizing Stalin. This report caused quite a
stir internationally when it’s text was released. The CPC quickly expressed its disagreement with Khrushchev’s
report. As part
of these exchanges, the CPC published “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (April, 1956) and “More on
the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (December, 1956), seeking to refute several points made in Khrushchev’s
report.

In this context of growing dissent, a series of meetings of the world’s Communist Parties were staged.
The two principal such meetings were those held in Moscow in 1957 and 1960. Though ostensibly to build the unity of the Communist Movement,
they were dominated by the widening rift between the CPSU and the CPC, and at
each both sides fought to have their views incorporated into the final documents.
Although China could count on the unqualified support of only the Albanian
delegation, it reportedly managed to have some important amendments included
in the documents issued from the conferences. The documents of those meetings
were among the last efforts made to compromise on several major issues between the two
parties and themselves became reference points in the polemic that followed.

Up to this time the CPC and the CPSU took care to not
criticize each other openly by name, instead referring obliquely to
"revisionists" (from the Chinese side), or to "splittists"
(from the Soviet side), in the International Communist Movement (ICM), or using
the issue of Titoism and Yugoslavia as a stand-in for the larger issue of
conduction of the ICM. Nonetheless, tensions were often high.
In June 1960, Chinese officials -including Zhou Enlai- had pointedly criticized
Soviet policies in front of the Soviet delegates (some would say
"attacked" the Soviet delegation). The Soviets attempted to
bring the CPC to heel by suspending distribution of Chinese periodicals in the
USSR, and in July of that year, all Soviet technical assistants -some 3,000 in
all- were withdrawn from China. Nonetheless, later in 1960 things were
still cool enough that the CPC could proclaim "Eternal, Unbreakable
Sino-Soviet Friendship" (Peking
Review,No. 49/50 of 1960).

In June of 1963 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter
to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in response
to its letter of March 30, 1963. In it, the CPC took the offensive
and, reasserting that
"revisionism" was the main danger within the socialist camp, spelled out its differences with the leadership of the
CPSU and made a number of proposals. The Chinese quickly translated it
into several languages and published it, along with the texts of the CPSU letters of February 21 and
March 30, 1963, and the CPC letter of March 9, 1963, as A Proposal
Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement.

The CPSU responded to the publication of the CPC's Proposal by
publishing an Open Letter detailing its position on the matter and
holding the CPC responsible for the divisions in the ICM. Having
made its point, the CPSU
followed by proposing -e.g. in a letter to the CPC, dated November
29, 1963- that the polemic be taken out of public view, as well as advancing a
set of counterproposals which, it claimed, would "normalize"
relations.